Healing with twisting, twisting words

Yaminahua shamans in Peruvian Amazonia use complex, opaque metaphorical language in their power songs, which are their most important tools for journeying and opening an interactive space with the spirits – and for bringing energy and healing through. This is called, literally, “twisting-twisting words”. One shaman explains that with ordinary words, you’ll “crash” in this deeper reality; “twisting words” let you circle around and see.
    Wherever the old ways of dreaming and soul healing are still alive, poets of consciousness - those born and dreamed to be our shamans and Speakers - know what this means.We'll never be able to travel the song lines and the story lines into the space where worlds are made and can be recreated until we come up with our own fresh words.
    We need twisting words to change and twist the behavior of the body, in the direction of health, and to re-weave tangled or torn energy webs. We need to twist and shout our way out of the boxes, constructed by limited and self-limiting belief systems, that we sometimes mistake for home.
     Keeping a journal and letting fresh words and images burst from our dreams and adventures is a way of putting yourself on the way to becoming a poet of consciousness who can offer word doctoring in this way.

text adapted from Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul. by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books. 

Image: cover of a dream art journal kept by dream teacher Véronique Barek-Deligny